Freedmen's Plots

In the years of chaos and dislocation after the Civil War, a group of freed slaves clustered along a quiet road near Bethania.

They tended garden patches in their small homes, worshipped in their own church and went on to establish their own school, two stores and a canning factory.

Today much of their history is found in fragmentary foundations and a few remaining houses along Bethania-Rural Hall Road.

At 11:30 this morning, the Forsyth County Historic Resources Commission will dedicate a marker for the Bethania Freedmen's Community, which sprang up along Bethania-Rural Hall Road after the Civil War.

The marker is a step on the road to the formal recognition that Ali Shabazz, a descendant of those freed slaves, has worked toward for nearly 30 years.

His quest is about fairness, Shabazz said. It's also about setting the historical record straight. The remnants of the small, scattered black Freedman's Community is as much a part of Bethania history as the meticulously preserved 18th-century houses that line Main Street.

"We've got the sweat equity. We've put the time in," he said. "We've been here since slavery."

Slave labor, much of it from the nearby Oak Grove Plantation, built many of the historic buildings in the town of Bethania. Slave sweat powered the Conrad Mill on the plantation during the Civil War, Shabazz said.

After the Civil War, the former slaves built a thriving community by dint of hard work. A log church, which was built in 1850 for slaves, became the AME Zion Church in 1875. That church still serves the community.

Some people have told Shabazz that the history he clings to is best forgotten, he said.

Even some members of his community don't feel that their struggles were so unusual or worth commemorating, he said.

Shabazz's campaign for recognition of the Freedman's Community has been caught up in recent years with the question of what constitutes the town of Bethania.

Moravians from Bethabara settled the town of Bethania in 1759. The town expanded by an additional 500 acres in 1771 with the permission of the Moravian Church, said Mo Hartley, Old Salem's director of archaeology. That expansion took in the area that is the Freedman's Community.

In 1995, when Winston-Salem wanted to annex Bethania, some residents persuaded the General Assembly to revive the town charter and incorporate Bethania.

The new town included about 400 acres, and 300 people, most of whom were white. At the time, Shabazz and other descendants of the community felt disappointed by the exclusion. He said that black people were left out of the meetings about the revived town and did not have a voice in the process.

The question about town boundaries was tied up in the court system until 2006 when the N.C. Supreme Court upheld the city of Winston-Salem's plan to annex about 20 square miles of Forsyth County, including the Freedman's Community.

Shabazz said that the values that built the community: thrift, hard work, faith and education are timeless, and they are a source of pride.

The years immediately after the Civil War saw a lot of quiet improvement in black people's lives, he said. He would like to see the community eventually get on the National Register of Historic Places.

Hartley said that some buildings remain from the late 19th century and that there are archaeological remains that would benefit from further study. The marker is an important first step on the road toward greater recognition for the history in the area, which might make it easier to get grants to conduct studies.

The Freedman's Community is only one of several such communities that thrived in the area.

Much of the history of those communities has been lost.

"When the dominant society is at loose ends and at odds with its own situation, there's not much recorded," Hartley said of the period after the Civil War. "We certainly don't have the voices of those African-Americans. Most of them were not writing their history. Most of them were engaged in survival."

But the people of the Freedman's Community deserve recognition, he said.

"Bethania's ongoing survival and prosperity depended in large part on the presence of this labor force," he said.

After the Civil War, the community displayed an entrepreneurial spirit.

"They were active in searching for the ways and the means," he said, "to maintain themselves and to be productive."

■ Mary Giunca can be reached at 727-4089 or at mgiunca@wsjournal.com.